Once again, my thanks to Baylink for the beta.
It had taken thirty-five precious minutes, but Casey and his team had finally completed triage on Bartowski's purchasing binge. All told, he had made 19 separate online purchases. Chuck was going to have one hell of a credit card bill if he somehow lived to pay it.
The proximity of Dallas to Fort Worth had complicated things. The ground to cover was doubled, and Bartowski was shrewd enough to spread his purchases around. The left side of the wall monitor now showed a map with all the possible routes represented by the purchases. The map looked like a rainbow-colored spider web.
At least the plane flights weren't a problem. Casey had alerts set up on all of Bartowski's credentials, so even if the NSA hadn't been watching his credit card, they would have known the moment he boarded a flight. Since they were in Dallas, one phone call would have ensured the plane didn't take off before Casey got there. Game over.
The flip side was that the team had been forced to write off local transportation, as the regional transit authorities didn't track passenger information. If Bartowski stayed local, they would need to hope that he made some kind of mistake and showed up on the grid again. But to stay local, he would need to keep his cool, and Casey was betting that Bartowski was going to run.
That left ground transportation out of Dallas. Each company on the list had a different mechanism for tracking passengers, and each mechanism left much to be desired. Amtrak, for example, didn't start scanning tickets until the train was underway, so Bartowski would have an extra fifteen-minute cushion if he hopped a train.
The various systems did have enough hooks that the team was able to watch them for activity, but they needed to do it manually. That meant tasking both Thornton and O'Leary to cover those systems, leaving only Casey and Hale to pursue their other leads. Just another in a series of minor victories for Bartowski. Luckily, Casey only had to win once.
With things momentarily under control, he walked over to the wet bar and grabbed a plastic bottle of orange juice from the small built-in refrigerator. He snapped the cap off its plastic guard and downed the contents in a single go. With a bit of a start, he realized that although he was almost painfully thirsty, he hadn't eaten in several hours and didn't feel the slightest pang of hunger.
The first symptoms of the Fulcrum poison were starting to manifest.
He compartmentalized the worry. Nothing to be done about it but re-focus on what would get him the antidote. He grabbed a bottle of water, walked to the back of the plane cabin and dropped into a plush swiveling chair. The chair felt a little too good after the day he'd had. He wasn't going to stay there long, but he needed a few minutes to figure some things out.
First up was putting himself into Bartowski's Chuck Taylors. Until Casey understood Bartowski's objectives, Casey could only react to what Bartowski did. That gave Chuck a big advantage.
Plus, he needed to figure out who his competition from the Buy More was. Walker was back in Los Angeles, as far as he could tell, but she could have sent a spook in her place. More likely it was Fulcrum. They didn't like sitting on the sidelines.
Whoever it was, they were getting their information from high up. The source was either in Beckman's office, in Graham's office ... or in the room with him. Maybe Jennings had lied to him when he said there wouldn't be Fulcrum agents on Casey's team. Yet another cheerful thought.
He stared at the map and all its possibilities again. There were too many moving pieces for normal circumstances. But now, if he didn't find Bartowski in the next day or so, he was going to die.
"No pressure," Casey muttered to himself.
"Sir?" Hale said.
Casey's eyes popped open. A digital clock on the front wall told him he'd fallen asleep for twenty minutes. Damn poison. "What is it?"
"We got the information from Google."
"We got a phone number?"
"Phone numbers. Bartowski forwarded his messages to three different phones."
Casey started getting an all-too-familiar feeling in his gut. More games. He forced his unwilling body upright, giving the haze in his head a chance to clear a bit. "Can we track them?"
"Already on the monitor."
He looked towards the front wall. Three phone numbers blinked on the map in little round bubbles. One was heading to Fort Worth, one was already in Dallas, and one was heading north towards Farmer's Branch.
The team stared at the map. "Which one do we follow?" Thornton asked.
Hale said, "We can't know which one is actually Bartowski. We need to follow all of them."
Casey noticed something. ""No. They're all decoys."
"Sir?"
"Look at the map. See anything strange?"
The team was quiet. After a long moment, O'Leary said, "None of the routes head south."
"Give the lady a cigar. Bartowski laid down a ton of trails, but he didn't lay a single one to the south. He didn't want us to get lucky and end up going the right direction." A rookie mistake. Finally.
"So how do we find him?"
Casey thought about that for a moment. Heading too far south meant bumping up against the Gulf of Mexico or the Mexican border. That meant fewer escape routes, which went against the way Bartowski had played things until now. So, that strategy didn't make sense unless he planned on crossing the border. But Bartowski couldn't cross the border on his own – Canadian and Mexican border authorities had orders not to let him leave the country.
To cross the border, Bartowski would need help. Help meant one person. Walker.
Casey said, "Could Bartowski have left a hidden clue in his phone message?"
"I thought of that," said Thornton. "He made reference to Where in the World is Chuck Bartowski, which is a play off of the old computer game Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, so he might be doubling back to San Diego. He referred to Chuy's, which is a restaurant chain with locations all over Texas, not to mention Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama. Turtle Creek is the name of a winery in Massachussetts, a casino in Michigan, and a golf course in Pennsylvania. He also said, 'Let's be careful out there,' a reference to Hill Street Blues, so maybe wherever he's going is on Hill Street. Heck, for all we know, the area code or the GPS coordinates in the phone number could point to where he's going."
Casey raised an eyebrow. "Frustrated, Agent Thornton?"
The other agent almost said something else, but thought better of it. "Sorry, sir."
Casey let it go. Bartowski was frustrating all of them. "Can a Google Voice account be set up to give different messages to different phone numbers?"
"Yes."
"Can you spoof a phone number and call in?"
"Sure. What number?"
Casey's phone buzzed with an incoming call. Walker was calling for another update. Good. If Walker was calling for updates, it meant her foot was still nailed to the ground in Los Angeles. She wouldn't call once she left town, because while the NSA couldn't pinpoint her exact location, they could trace her call back to a particular cell tower. She wouldn't want Casey to know where she was, so as long as he kept getting phone calls, that meant she hadn't left to rendezvous with Bartowski.
He touched a button to freeze the display and held out the phone so the man could read her number. "This one."
Hale brought up a green command-line window with a plain white font and typed furiously. Casey understood little of it besides the phone number. Soon, Hale punched the Enter key and a batch of text scrolled down the window. Speakers emitted a series of sounds for the numbers being dialed. The phone rang once. Chuck spoke, his voice fast and soft, vastly different from the brave front he put up in the other message.
"I'm too tired to be eloquent, Sarah, so hopefully this will all come out right. I'm no Superman, but I'm smart enough to figure some things out, and I know you didn't put the device in the watch. Casey did.
"I'm not sure whether you're with Casey, but if you are, slip away from him and meet me in Laredo. You can figure out where I'll be waiting. You just need to think about something real we shared. Meet me before twenty-three-hundred on Wednesday, but after that I'll need to leave. Casey is too close behind.
"Don't be fooled, Sarah – I don't pretend to know what the future holds. All I know is that if we can share something real, maybe that's the first step to figuring out how to be together."
Casey grinned and clapped Hale on the shoulder. Finally, they knew where Bartowski was going.
Walker would have heard the message. Casey had given her the phone number from the Buy More in a previous update, thinking it to be harmless enough. He had damn near given her and Bartowski a chance to meet up and cross the border from Laredo into Mexico, and then the two would have become nearly impossible to track.
Walker was still in Los Angeles because if she moved too soon, there was a better chance she'd attract attention. But she wouldn't wait much longer. She would need to leave for Laredo soon so she had enough time to find Chuck and arrange anonymous passage for the two of them to cross the border.
Bartowski – and Walker – were going to have a very unpleasant surprise waiting for them in Laredo.
Sarah switched off her phone when her call rolled to Casey's voice mail. She was glad he didn't answer. He had hardly been in a sharing mood when she had gotten him to pick up, and it saved her from having to feed him the lie she had fabricated. Besides, she had the information she needed. If Casey didn't answer, he didn't have Chuck.
She slid the phone into her pocket and stepped between two buildings onto the airport tarmac. A series of monochromatic hangars ran along each side of the broad strip of concrete. Oil and gas fumes lingered over the runways ahead, discernible both by the heavy smell and their rippling distortion of the low orange sun. A smallish jet taxied the other direction towards one of the back hangars. She paid it no mind. It was the wrong model, too small for what she needed, and she already had targets picked out.
To get to Chuck, she needed a plane, and there were plenty to be found at the Van Nuys airport. The airport was convenient, not just because it was located only twenty minutes from her apartment, but because it was one of the busiest general aviation airports in the world. An extra flight out at any time of day or night was unlikely to draw attention.
Her hair was pulled back in a pony tail beneath a black baseball cap with "KRO Financial" custom-lettered on the front. Some official-looking forms were pinned to her clipboard, the stack subdivided into sets with binder clips. Each set contained detailed information on a prospect who had a charter jet with the appropriate range and speed to get her where she needed to go without stopping to refuel. More importantly, each owner had a weakness that Sarah could exploit.
Her first prospect was just a few hangars down from her starting point. The hangar door was closed; the office was dark. Sarah shifted the top sheaf of papers to the back of the stack and moved on.
Three buildings down, she found candidate plane number two in the hangar behind an open door, but the office was locked and there was no sign of the pilot. She mentally marked that one a maybe.
She ducked between hangars to slide over to the next row. Emerging from the shadows, she spotted her third target plane and its pilot on the tarmac across the way. She breathed a relieved sigh, then put on her surliest expression as she approached.
The pilot was a kind-looking man, silver-haired with bushy eyebrows and a blue flight jacket. An exterior access panel under one of the wing-mounted jets sat open, and he was poking around the engine with a small screwdriver. She didn't bother addressing him. She walked right past him to read the plane's registry number from the plane's tail, penning a large check mark next to the matching number on her form.
The pilot looked curiously at her. "Can I help you?" he asked in a raspy voice.
"Are you Dominic Santini of Santini Air?
"Yes."
"Then you can help by staying out of my way." She started circling the plane, beginning a pre-flight check.
"I don't understand."
"I assume you understand the past due notices that your bank was sending you."
"But–"
"But nothing. They sold us your loan, and I'm here to repossess the plane." She started inspecting the left wing, checking the motion of the flap and the aileron.
"I just talked to the bank last week. We worked out a payment plan. They said I had time!"
"Time's up. The papers have been filed, and this plane now belongs to us." Satisfied that the left wing was in good working order, she walked around the back of the plane to inspect the other wing.
"Look," he started, then hurried to follow her around the plane. "Things are starting to turn around. I've got a big contract lined up in the Midwest starting tomorrow. I'll net thirty-six thousand in the next week. Let me complete the contract, and I'll pay you guys eighty percent of that money. I've got two other contracts this month that will allow me to do the same."
"Yeah, we've heard that before." She pulled one last time on the wing, and then walked towards the front of the plane, running her fingers along the fuselage to check for cracks and other signs of wear.
Behind her, so quietly she almost didn't hear, he said, "Don't take this plane. It's all I have."
She had expected more desperate bargaining. She hadn't expected the quiet dignity of the man's request. It was all she could do to keep up the pretense, to feign indifference to the man's plight. Her plan would still work, but she'd feel far worse about it.
Sarah pretended to appraise Dominic. "You seem like an honest man. Let's say for a moment that I believed your story, and was prepared to make an exception. The problem is that we don't see any money coming in for, what, a week? Then my boss is on my back, and if you don't come through, I'm screwed."
His logical answer was to tell Sarah to go repossess one of the other planes in the stack. She even went so far as to lift the clipboard a bit, as if by coincidence, to prompt him with the answer. Apparently Dominic wasn't the type of man to throw somebody else under a truck he'd narrowly dodged. "I can't offer you anything more," he said. "I'll get you the money."
"Look, I need to bring in something by noon tomorrow, and the only other planes on my list are halfway across the county. If you can give me a lift, I can grab another plane in the morning, and you can have your extra week to come through. Otherwise, I need to take yours."
Dominic thought about it, then nodded acceptance, although he clearly wasn't all that happy about it.
That made two of them.
The NSA Learjet was a whirlwind of activity. Casey and Thornton were stowing notes and computers in the main cabin while Hale was in the pilot's chair arguing with the control tower about how soon they could take off.
The speakers on the high-def monitor let out a quick sequence of musical beeps, indicating the audio had been activated. "Agent Casey," O'Leary called.
Casey looked up. She looked excited about something. "We're about to go wheels up. Is this important?"
"Very. We–"
"Hang on." He turned to Thornton. "Go help Hale convince those morons in the control tower that we need to take off now. Not in an hour, not in ten minutes, right now."
Thornton nodded and left. Casey put away some papers as he asked, "What'd you find?"
"We got a hit on one of Bartowski's car rental reservations. He picked up a car."
At that, Casey's head popped up. "Where?"
"About thirty minutes south of your location."
"Did we ever finish locating Bartowski's potential Stanford connections?"
"Yes, sir. All five are accounted for."
The gleam in her eye echoed his intuition. Somebody had to pick up the car, and with Walker in Los Angeles and the Stanford connections eliminated, it had to be Bartowski.
Now the credit card ploy made even more sense. It was tough to rent a car without a credit card, so Bartowski had used the other charges as a smokescreen. It wasn't a bad gamble, really. With all the false trails Bartowski had laid down, Casey had almost told the team to skip tracking the car rentals because, like the plane tickets, they had seemed like an obvious ruse. The reverse psychology had damn near paid off.
"You get the GPS tracking information for the car?"
"Sent to your phone."
Casey nodded approvingly. "Nice work, Agent O'Leary. Can you still make your plans this evening?"
"If I hurry."
"Then go. And thank you."
With a proud smile, O'Leary signed off. Her half of the monitor went dark.
Thornton came back from the cockpit. "We're ready. Did she find anything important?"
Casey's mind worked fast as he walked to the corner of the cabin where he had stashed his gear. "Doubtful, but I'm going to head down and check it out, just in case. I can drive to Laredo when it doesn't pan out." At Thornton's curious expression, Casey added, "Bartowski plans to be in Laredo until tomorrow evening, so I've got the time to check out O'Leary's lead. And between you and me, I wouldn't mind a stop-off in Austin. Great barbecue."
Thornton grinned. "Bring extra."
"Done." Casey slung his duffel over his shoulder and his coat over his arm. He headed for the door. "Call me when you're on the ground; you'll need to set up surveillance the minute you land. I want to be sure we get Bartowski before he gets anywhere near the border. Also, track every plane that comes into the Laredo airport. Be on the lookout for Agent Walker. She's in Los Angeles right now, but could leave for Laredo at any time."
"And if we find her?"
"Track her, but do not approach. Bartowski is the important one, and we may need her to lead us to him."
"Roger that."
Just inside the door, he grabbed two bottles of water from the wet bar and shoved them into a mesh pocket on the outside of the duffel. After a quick nod to Thornton, Casey descended the steps off the plane. As he walked away, the plane door shut behind him and the engines fired up, leaving Casey to trail Bartowski on his own. That was just the way Casey wanted things.
Bartowski had damn near pulled it off. He had made a single, subtle mistake of not laying any trails to the south. If not for that, Thornton, Hale, and Casey would be out chasing Bartowski's three decoy phones. Three agents would have been tied up, so Casey would have ordered O'Leary to stop watching the car rentals in favor of the other transportation methods.
He would never have had the brainstorm about a different phone message for Walker. He would never have learned about the car rental.
Casey would never have put the pieces together.
Walker was one of the best. If she managed to rendezvous with Bartowski in Laredo, the two were as good as gone. Now, that wasn't going to happen.
Bartowski had almost gotten away. Almost. But Casey knew about the rental car, so there was no way Bartowski was ever going to make it to Laredo, let alone his rendezvous with Agent Walker.